U. Pittsburgh Introducing Initiative for ‘Justice Teaching’ in Public Schools
“make recommendations for equity, justice, and anti-racism for public education, higher education, and society”
The left is intent on imposing their political agenda on education at every level. This is just one example of how they are going about it.
Campus Reform reports:
Pitt introduces initiative for ‘justice teaching’ in public schools
Faculty at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Education recently put together a three-year working group called the PittEd Justice Collective. This group was created on June 1 in response to “the loss of Black lives through police brutality and other forms of institutional injustice” with a stated purpose to “situate equity and justice across all levels of our school’s operations, culture, climate, and academic engagements.”
The group aims to collaborate with “school districts on justice teaching, with an explicit focus on pedagogies, practices, and assessments” and establish a “Youth-for-Justice Dean’s Advisory Committee.”
It also seeks to “make recommendations for equity, justice, and anti-racism for public education, higher education, and society.”
The collective has already fostered partnerships with other projects such as Shifting Power in Educational Research and Development, the Southwestern PA Personalized Learning Network, and Remaking Tomorrow: Learning in a Post-Pandemic Future.
In order to fulfill these goals, the collective has created its “Higher Education and Racism Initiative” or H.E.A.R. This initiative provides an opportunity for University of Pittsburgh graduate students to publish their own research on “individual and institutional anti-racism in colleges.” The initiative hopes to “create and sustain a pipeline of justice-minded activists, researchers, educators, practitioners, and policymakers.”
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The JUST US Elitists……
Let them teach their own kids this way, not mine.
All to raise a bunch of future workplace political officers.
The Anti-American left has been doing this exact thing for years. They’ve just been trying to hide it. They never did a very good job of hiding it. They were always too proud of it, and of themselves. Now they aren’t even bothering.
“The reason the establishment doesn’t care to hide the iron fist anymore is they’ve bet the farm. They’re all in.” wretchardthecat on Twitter (AKA Richard Fernandez, author to the blog “The Belmont Club”)
From the Summer 2006 volume of City Journal, by Sol Stern:
https://www.city-journal.org/html/ed-schools%E2%80%99-latest%E2%80%94and-worst%E2%80%94humbug-12948.html
“The Ed Schools’ Latest—and Worst—Humbug
Teaching for ‘social justice’ is a cruel hoax on disadvantaged kids.”
The education establishment is viciously leftist. How vicious and how leftist? One of the the chief instigators of this push to cultivate this ‘social justice’ mental illness on vulnerable children is none other than unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist and Barack Obama’s mentor (and no doubt ghost writer) Bill Ayers. Remember, Obama launched his political career in Bill Ayers’ living room.
“…Ayers has acknowledged committing crimes during his underground days—crimes that arguably amounted to treason. Yet thanks to procedural complications and a lack of witnesses, he never went to trial or to jail. A few years after stepping out of the shadows, Ayers reflected on his odyssey in a conversation with journalists Peter Collier and David Horowitz: “Guilty as hell, free as a bird—America is a great country,” he exulted.
But that was just half the wonder of it. Ayers would soon go on to disprove thoroughly F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous though mistaken aphorism that ‘there are no second acts in American lives.’ Ayers’s spectacular second act began when he enrolled at Columbia University’s Teachers College in 1984. Then 40, he planned to stay just to get a teaching credential. (He had taught in a “Freedom School” during his pre-underground student radical days.) But he experienced an epiphany in a course taught by Maxine Greene, a leading light of the “critical pedagogy” (note: critical pedagogy is simply an outgrowth of ‘The Frankfurt School’ and its Marxist critical theory, as is critical race theory; it’s just Marxism redefined in cultural rather than economic or class terms) movement. As Ayers wrote later, he took fire from Greene’s lectures on how the “oppressive hegemony” of the capitalist social order “reproduces” itself through the traditional practice of public schooling—critical pedagogy’s fancy way of saying that the evil corporations exercise thought control through the schools.
It hadn’t occurred to Ayers that an ed-school professor could speak or write as an authentic American radical. “There are vast dislocations in industrial towns, erosions of trade unions; there is little sign of class consciousness today,” Greene had proclaimed in the Harvard Education Review. “Our great cities are burnished on the surfaces, building high technologies, displaying astonishing consumer goods. And on the side streets, in the crevices, in the burnt-out neighborhoods, there are the rootless, the dependent, the sick, the permanently unemployed. There is little sense of agency, even among the brightly successful; there is little capacity to look at things as if they could be otherwise.”
Greene told future teachers that they could help change this bleak landscape by developing a “transformative” vision (note: recall Obama’s call for a “fundamental transformation” of this nation; this is what he meant, and this is where he got it) of social justice and democracy in their classrooms. Her vision, though, was a far cry from the democratic optimism of the Founding Fathers, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King Jr., which most parents would endorse. Instead, critical pedagogy theorists nurse a rancorous view of an America in which it is always two minutes to midnight and a knock on the door by the thought police is imminent. The education professors feel themselves anointed to use the nation’s K–12 classrooms to resist this oppressive system. Thus Maxine Greene urged teachers not to mince words with children about the evils of the existing social order. They should portray “homelessness as a consequence of the private dealings of landlords, an arms buildup as a consequence of corporate decisions, racial exclusion as a consequence of a private property-holder’s choice.” In other words, they should turn the little ones into young socialists and critical theorists.
All music to Bill Ayers’s ears. The ex-Weatherman glimpsed a new radical vocation. He dreamed of bringing the revolution from the streets to the schools. And that’s exactly what he has managed to do.
With his Teachers College credential in hand, Ayers landed an ed-school appointment back in Chicago, where his father was CEO of Commonwealth Edison and nicely plugged in to the city’s political establishment. These days, Ayers carries the joint titles of Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago. One of his several books on the moral imperative of teaching for social justice is a bestseller in ed-school courses. Like many other tenured and well-heeled radicals, Ayers keeps hoping for a revolutionary upheaval that will finally bring down American capitalism and imperialism. But now, instead of planting bombs in bathrooms, he has been planting the seeds of resistance and rebellion in America’s future teachers, who will then pass on the lessons to the students in their classrooms…”
It’s a very lengthy article. So lengthy the above only gives a taste as to what’s in it. But it’s excellent and as they say you need to read the whole thing. But remember; Maxine Greene was already a leading light in the Ed School establishment, and she (and it) were already well entrenched in setting the curriculum for “teaching for social justice” in 1984 (how fitting) when Ayers embarked on getting a teaching credential. That’s nearly 40 years ago. But the “critical pedagogy” has its roots in the 1960s.
While teaching for social justice the classroom Marxist revolutionaries won’t teach English to their “black, indigenous, or people of color (BIPOC)” students. English, you see is racist. How racist? Some woke English teachers teach their students East African oral tradition, which is doubly stupid because black children who are descendants of slaves brought over during the period of the Atlantic slave trade have their roots in West Africa. So if being woke in the classroom is important to you, SJW, then you just insulted the students’ ethnic heritage.
“Teaching for social justice” also requires that the teacher must not evaluate a student’s writing ability on the quality of the product. Indeed, assessing a student’s writing ability in any way promotes “white language supremacy.” Instead, the teacher must grade the writing project on the “effort” the student put into the project. And of course they have to presume the black and hispanic kids put far more effort into the project because of “institutional racism” than the white kids who breezed through it because of their white privilege.
Speaking of not hiding the iron fist, the University of Chicago English Dept. will not accept any graduate students for the 2021 except those committed to “equity” and “social justice.” They cite their support for #BLM, and will require students to take black (grievance) studies to demonstrate their commitment to Ayers,’ Dorn,’ and Greene’s Marxist revolution.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/09/16/university-chicago-english-faculty-prioritizes-black-studies-graduate-students-2021.
The SJWs in the classroom deprive their students of an actual education because the curriculum is the product of the “systemic racism” at the heart of our capitalist and imperialist white supremacist xtofascist nation which as we leaned from now Pulitzer-prize winning author Nikole Hannah-Jones and the NYT magazine was really founded in 1619.
“Teaching for social justice” is the perfect self-fulfilling scam. From K-12, or through college which is even worse, “black and brown” kids are indoctrinated to believe America is racist and the white supremacists will hold them back.
Then don’t teach “black and brown” kids English. Affirm the “Ebonics” or border Spanglish they speak at home. Inflate the grades on their crappy, unintelligible homework and tests because despite all the misspellings, grammar mistakes, and the fact no one can possibly decipher what they’re trying to say they clearly put a lot of “effort” in whatever they turned in because of the forces of injustice that have been working against them since the day they were born in this evil country. Give bonus points to the BIPOC students who don’t bother turning in an assignment or, even better, showing up for class for their deep understanding of the racist system that makes their efforts futile.
Teach math, science, history, etc., or rather DON’T teach all other subjects, the same way for the same reason. Because those subjects are racist, too.
One advantage Americans are automatically assumed to have particularly on the international job market is that they speak English. Potential employers are thinking standard English, not Ebonics or Spanglish. They aren’t going to offer jobs when these kids shock them at the interview, if they even get an interview since they can’t write a resume or fill out an application.
Then their commie professors will tell them, “We told you so. You can’t find a decent job because Amerikkka is racist, and white privilege is a worldwide phenomenon. The only thing that will save you is the revolution.”
And they fall for it.